Why it was wrong to cancel exams

In the past week, my two daughters have had their school musical cancelled, along with a cello exam, a clarinet exam, an interview for a student position in school, and a SAT test. Last night we learned that all schools in the UK will close at the end of the week. ‘They are taking away everything that I have been working for’, was how one of my daughters expressed her frustration.

I fear that this will be how many students in Years 11 and 13, along with their teachers, felt yesterday when news broke that this year’s GCSE and A-level exams have been cancelled as a result of the coronavirus crisis and the school closures.

I do not want to understate the challenges posed by setting public exams at a time when schools are closing, or at least paring back provision to cater for a small number of pupils. Exam boards are probably also short-staffed. The closure of schools from next week would have made it difficult for pupils to complete their courses and prepare for their exams.

But many students were about to be granted study leave anyway, either just before or after the Easter holidays, so that they could revise at home. Completing their courses remotely may have put them at a disadvantage, but nearly all pupils would be in a similar situation and exam boards would surely make allowances in terms of grade boundaries.

There would also of course be the challenge of putting on exams in schools that are not fully open. Schools have designated exam officers who may be self-isolating, and invigilators would need to be employed to run the exams. Some students may be unwell with the virus and so would have to take the exams at another time. On the plus side, exams require students to sit and work individually at desks, with minimal social contact.

Exam grades are not the ends of education. Like many others, I have been arguing for some time that schools today place too much emphasis on exams and data, at the expense of the intrinsic value of learning. That is, exploring questions of what is true, what is right and what is beautiful, enabling young people to inherit the wisdom of their teachers, and urging them to join in conversations about society, the economy and the environment.

But exams have an important role to play both for young people and society more broadly – they validate learning and achievement. Exams have their limitations. But for students they provide a focus, structure and culmination for their study. They are an opportunity for students to demonstrate what they have learnt and what they can do. Exams are also, of course, key to how universities and employers assess applicants.

Cancelling these exams presents enormous challenges for assessing student achievement in a way that is fair, valid and standardised. The knock-on effect in terms of university admissions will be highly problematic. More immediately, this move has removed the very thing that students and teachers have been working towards for the best part of two years. What should the teachers teach and what should the students study if the government has just removed the goal to which they have all been working towards?

We could argue that the situation provides an opportunity to show students that education is about more than exams. But this is a hard sell given they certainly were important last week. Plus we should interrogate the context in which this decision was made.

The Covid-19 crisis is an unprecedented situation in recent times. Difficult decisions are having to be made with many people suffering the effects. Judgements need to be made that weigh the costs and benefits of things like keeping schools open versus isolating people to slow the transmission of the virus. Of course, the government wants to protect as many people as possible. But that doesn’t mean that safety is an absolute that overrides all the other aspects of life that we value. Surely these exams could have still gone ahead if sensible steps were taken to minimise any risk.

What message are we sending to young people by cancelling their exams rather than finding a way to allow them to go ahead? And why cancellation rather than postponement, which would at least show that the government recognises and values the important work everyone has put in?

In recent years, schools have given a lot of attention to the idea of building young people’s resilience. But while we can all sit in classrooms and talk about it, real resilience comes from facing and responding to adversity in a mature way. Until now, by keeping schools open during a health emergency, the government and teachers had been doing just that. Unfortunately, when faced with the challenge of public exams, it appears the government has told teachers and students to give up.

So here we are – 10 weeks into Britain’s three-week lockdown. We hope you are all staying sane out there, and that spiked has been of some assistance in that. We have ramped up our output of late, to provide a challenge to the Covid consensus. But we couldn’t have done that without your support. spiked – unlike so many things these days – is completely free. We rely on our loyal readers to fund our journalism. So if you enjoy our work, please do consider becoming a regular donor. Even £5 per month can be a huge help. You can donate here.Thank you! And stay well.

S. Garside

20th March 2020 at 1:39 am

State schools have been ORDERED to close, whereas private schools have merely been ASKED to close, and most private school, at the time of this comment, are remaining open, especially boarding schools.
If exams went ahead, there MAY just be an unfair playing field! And I’m of the opinion that many (not all) State schools can compete, in terms of formal exams, with private schools. But even they would struggle to keep a fair game whilst being shut for the 2 months before the exam season.

A way round it could have been 2 sets of grade boundaries, but as some private schools will close and do so at different times, this would muddy the waters.

James Knight

19th March 2020 at 8:37 pm

Blanket measures may well be ineffective as well as costly. As many point out, they may be counterproductive. The WHO has a point, you need testing, testing, testing to identify and isolate carriers and focus on the highest risk people. Otherwise it is like saying if there is a one nanometer particle of covid19 in the UK then the whole country must stop.

Gordon Das Gopher

19th March 2020 at 6:24 pm

Alex I suspect your daughters are in a very small group of kids who are upset about schools closing and cancelled exams.

Jim Lawrie

19th March 2020 at 9:29 pm

I think most youngsters know that this will put a question mark over them for many years to come.

Those whose perfectly legitimate plan was to study for and pass exams and not coursework, will be badly affected. Boys will lose out on University places to lower calibre girls.

Christopher Tyson

19th March 2020 at 6:08 pm

I saw my brother yesterday for the first time since the crisis, the first thing he said to me was ‘they’ve stopped the football’, I’m not as football crazy as he is, but I felt his pain, as Chelsea fans we were looking forward to a top four spot, but we could also sympathise with Liverpool fans with prospect of missing out on a deserved premiership title.
I talked about the church closures with my mum, church where you go for solace and meaning, particularly in difficult times. It’s, well, sacred, if church can be so easily suspended, it calls religiosity into question, maybe we don’t have to go at all.
My point is that we all have things that are deeply important to us, and we hope that our government will not make these decisions lightly, we hope that they will consider all possibilities and other ways to carry on with the things we value. If the specialist and government decide that these measure must be taken, we have to support their decisions, the problem is that from experience we don’t have a great deal of faith in the wisdom and competence of our leaders and we suspect them of having dubious motives and agenda. Nonetheless the government has more resources, expertise, data etc at its disposal than the rest of us, we trust them, we have to.
PS On questions of politics we can all have a view, in a democracy all the more so. On technical question regarding virology and epidemiology, most of us would defer, nonetheless, we are still entitled to question the experts, to develop our own knowledge and they are not infallible.

Rob Dixon

19th March 2020 at 5:39 pm

“have had their school musical cancelled, along with a cello exam, a clarinet exam, an interview for a student position in school, and a SAT test”.
“‘They are taking away everything that I have been working for” Seriously, “they”?
Do your daughter a favour and explain that life sometimes throws curve balls at us and there’s nothing that can be done about it. Explain to her that “they” is a government dealing with an unprecendented crisis and sometimes school plays, student positions and even clarinet and cello exams might just have to go by the wayside for a short period whilst the grown-ups sort stuff out.
Modern parents seem to be bringing up a generation of kids in an environment where nothing bad must ever be allowed to happen to them and their comfortable life, no matter what, must always continue with no inconvenience or interruption to service…well guess what just happenened?

KATHLEEN CARR

19th March 2020 at 5:21 pm

Could have postponed exams until September-because if this virus is not sorted by then we are all F****d. Everyone who is not on the education payroll-exam markers , self employed teachers etc have now just lost their income. Also if children of essential workers are going in anyway & what is classed as essential or inessential- someone is going to bring in the virus anyway so ‘ Sledge hammer to crack a nut ‘?

Dodgy Geezer

19th March 2020 at 3:44 pm

“…The Covid-19 crisis is an unprecedented situation in recent times….”

Difficult to know how ‘unprecedented’. We don’t have enough basic data to determine the threat, and what data we do have – info from the Diamond Princess, for instance, is compatible with Covid-19 having exactly the same characteristics as regular influenza – an epidemic disease which can be fatal, but for which we do not close our society down …

Joyful Cynic

19th March 2020 at 5:14 pm

Well said. It is the only environment in which 100% of people were tested to provide an accurate infection and fatality rate (at that being a rather artificial environment conducive to infection with an untypical population spread).
About the only thing unprecedented about it seems to be the authorities total overreactions across the board. Even those actually trying NOT to overreact (which I think our government has tried) are being forced into steps to cope with the panic not the damn disease.